Listen to the Animals

Reports are starting to emerge of amazing animal stories from areas hit by Boxing Day's tsunami. Possibly the most incredible is from Yala National Park in Sri Lanka, the country's largest animal reserve, where not a single animal perished, despite destruction and total devestation all around them. Human bodies were found throughout the park by volunteers cleaning up, but not a single dead animal.

In this great age of technology, where people can order anything from tissues to televisions online and common objects like phones, radios and refrigerators can speak to each other to determine our needs, all the hi-tech processors and systems in our world were not able to protect us -- humans -- when Nature chose to exert a bit of force. Yet across the globe, animals -- and, it must be noted, the native tribes of the Andaman-Nicobar Islands -- needed none of our oh-so-advanced resources to know innately that danger was coming and to be prepared.

Another heartwarming story is of the one-year old orphaned baby hippo calf, Owen, as they've named him, who has latched onto a 100-year old giant tortoise of similar colouring since being rescued by volunteers from the Indian Ocean off Kenya. Owen follows Mzee, the tortoise, everywhere now, licking his head and protecting him from imagined danger.

This story, too, shows something so important that we can learn from animals: Acceptance. We humans still have just so far to go.